Avowed, the latest role-playing game from Obsidian Entertainment, casts the player as a magical envoy of the Aedyr Empire. You travel to a far-off land to investigate a plague known as the Dream Scourge. Along the way, you encounter various governmental figures—local rulers and representatives of the crown, town councils and mercenary organizations vying for control. There are also debates about the rights of various human and not-so-human creatures, including an enslaved undead caste that has literally sold their souls.
The game lets players make their own decisions about who to support, but the connecting thread is that local, democratic control tends to work better than top-down authority. Avowed may be a fantasy game with a lot of complicated gameplay mechanisms and statistics. But at heart, it's an interactive story about the tradeoffs involved in governance.
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